


Pretty, Ungainly Layers

by foxghost



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Haircuts, Hugs, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-30
Updated: 2011-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-28 13:10:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/308196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxghost/pseuds/foxghost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke attempts to cut her own hair in Anders' clinic; Anders assists.</p><p>
  <i>She glanced over to the desk where Anders sat scratching away with his quill, and she took the last sentence in her head and mulled it over. Pretty; check. Ungainly layers; check. She took in his patchwork coat with its moulting pauldrons, ridiculously padded with its multitude of buckles and straps, and Hawke couldn't help that little chuckle that escaped, only managing to turn it into a cough after Anders took note. He looked up from his parchment to see her pretending to wipe something invisible off the side of her mouth.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretty, Ungainly Layers

**Author's Note:**

> I keep this around to remind myself why I should never write het. All my women walks out like men on the other side, anyway.

"Do you ... want some help?"

It had been bothering him for a while now. Mostly, it was the smell. Hair had a singularly greasy, acrid aroma that coiled and unfurled in Anders' brain; a clearing in Amaranthine he set alight behind him hiding the evidence of torn limbs and rend flesh.

Fire destroyed, and subsequently cleansed, everything, a fact that Hawke was demonstrating with every slash of her dagger. She stared up through her newly cut fringe, measuring it out with her fingers and thumb to the point where it did not quite meet her eyes, gave it a quick slash, and quickly set it aflame with those same fingertips. A flick of her wrist sent the bits of hair into the air, where it burned a bright orange for a brief moment, never reaching the ground.

She didn't want to make a mess in his clinic. He appreciated that. That and the lunch basket she dropped on his desk unceremoniously before she proceeded to trim - burn - her hair.

"No." Her face gave away just a hint of annoyance. Leandra brought up the subject of her hair this morning, mentioned this lovely Elvhen hairdresser she knew that Lady so-and-so recommended and _why don't you come with your mother, dear, your hair could use a bit of styling_ as if Leandra never left to marry an apostate and spent twenty-five years getting her hair trimmed by father, then Bethany, and could have kept trimming it herself the way she did in the year they lived in Low Town.

Bethany might have liked that. Silks and petticoats, lacy ribbons in her hair, shopping for Orlesian perfume oils in High Town. Moira Hawke was too wary for such things; letting a hairdresser near her throat with an open blade? Unlikely. Silks were good under armour for practical, easy projectile removal. She had no use for pretty, ungainly layers.

She glanced over to the desk where Anders sat scratching away with his quill, and she took the last sentence in her head and mulled it over. Pretty; check. Ungainly layers; check. She took in his patchwork coat with its moulting pauldrons, ridiculously padded with its multitude of buckles and straps, and Hawke couldn't help that little chuckle that escaped, only managing to turn it into a cough after Anders took note. He looked up from his parchment to see her pretending to wipe something invisible off the side of her mouth.

He quirked an eyebrow, "is there something on my face?"

Scowl firmly back in place, Hawke grunted at him. "No."

"That's all you've said to me today," Anders pushed away from his desk. She had good days where she smiled a little and days like these, where the silence hung like something solid in the air between them, treacle thick. "I could have sworn I just caught you laughing."

"Do you know," Hawke tossed her dagger in the air, barely missing the low Dark Town ceiling, dipped forward and caught it behind her with one hand. Anders winced. "You're like a fabric stall in High Town?"

"I'm a," Anders took a moment to digest this, fed it through the part of his brain that was used to processing the nonsensical things that came out of Hawke's mouth, and it mentally shrugged. No answers there. "I'm a what?"

"You're all different textures." Moira tugged at a feather that was coming loose from his mantle, moving the hand toward his hair, which was long and silky, unlike her own.

Anders tipped his head away from her. "Moira," he warned.

"... and all of them much too pretty for me." Hawke gave up on being pretty a long time ago. Bethany had all the pretty of the Hawkes.

"Hardly." Anders moved to tuck a lock of stray hair behind his ear, not looking in her direction. "We've talked about this."

Had 'we'? She wanted to retort. Maybe she kept bringing it up, one way or another, because she was hoping he would change his mind. Instead, she handed him the dagger, hilt first. "You still offering?"

The first time little Beth ran and hid when father laid out the comb and blade and declared she wanted long hair - like mother - Moira requested that her own hair be cut short. It was long and coarse then, dried out from too much time in the sun, knotty and unmanageable. Of course Beth didn't want long hair like her sister's.

Malcolm did barber duty for their family. When he died, dead by a templar's blade, Beth took up the task, giving perfect fringes to Leandra and even, orderly shears to the back of Carver's head. Moira insisted on hacking her own with a dagger, guessing at the length behind her head and keeping the fringes from poking into her eyes.

Beth was family, but Beth wasn't father. In retrospect, Moira might have been a little jealous of Bethany. It was hard to think of now since one could not be jealous of the dead. Scratch that, she thought. At least Bethany didn't live to see their only brother join the Templars.

Not reading the significance of the action in the least, Anders took the dagger from her, finger-combing her hair into sections and razoring through them so that they fell in even layers. Her hair was thicker than his own, smooth, jet black. It stuck out at weird angles and she had little bald spots that were actually scars, some of them so old she must have grown up with them.

"I have a thick skull." She mumbled, as if reading his mind. His hands were a little cool, his motions precise and clinical. Anders had good, steady hands that smelled of elfroot and fresh dirt, with a layer of ozone, like the air above the tree tops just before dawn in Lothering, even after he washed them. Her father had larger hands that smelled the same - that could've been a childhood distortion, everything was bigger then - and Moira didn't know quite what to think about that.

"If you grow your hair out, you can just pull it back with a tie." Anders brushed a finger over her hairline, gathering a lock of hair to measure against her eyebrow. Moira suppressed a shiver, rubbing her arms. His hands stilled above her brow. "Are you cold?"

"Nn, no." He was so close that she could feel the heat radiating off of his hands, warm, like his magic. Moira had the urge to pull him down and kiss him, or perhaps, she would pull him down and throw him across the room. She felt an army of ants marching down her hairline, down her spine, all the way to her toes, and she shivered. "Just ... oh, bloody void. This is stupid."

She snatched the dagger out of his hand, disarming him so quickly he barely registered the motion, and somehow it ended up across the room, embedded in the wooden wall with a metallic twang.

"You're really articulate today. I mean, even more than usual. You're practically pedantic." Anders examined her hair, hovering inches from her face, and she couldn't stop the flush that crept up to the tips of her ears. If he noticed, he didn't bother teasing her about it. "It's a bit uneven, but ... it's better than I've ever seen it."

"I'm not used to people touching my head." Hawke blurted, a string of syllables mumbled so low he barely heard.

Anders moved his hand upwards toward his own blond locks. It was longer than he used to wear it in Ferelden, where he was vain and selfish and he took time brushing it out with a boar bristle brush, smoothing back the top until it shone before he tied it back with a piece of braided leather. He touched his half-tied hair now, unevenly cut and a little too long, barely kept off the tops of his ears with a ripped strand of bandage.

And somehow, it was an improvement. A character improvement, if not an aesthetic one. He allowed himself a self-deprecating chuckle and saw Hawke's scowl deepen.

"Yeah. Go ahead and laugh. I think it's stupid too."

"I'm not laughing at you, Moira." He added, quickly and without missing a beat, "I'm not suicidal."

She laughed then, in the way that she did, though rarely, a low rumble in her belly, mouth closed and her chin tucked into her chest. Her shark blue eyes glimmered for a moment gone too soon. "Anders, my boy. You had me fooled."

"If you're referring to my courting danger with templars and fighting darkspawn with my bare hands, may I remind you that you have done the same?" Anders moved his hand from his hair and rested his chin on his knuckles, elbow resting on his crossed knees, in a way that Hawke had decided was definitely 'seductively androgynous' and he smiled, a little lopsidedly. "I don't go around strolling in the gallows courtyard and flirt with the Knight Captain himself."

"I did not flirt with Cullen," she was only slightly flabbergasted that he would suggest such a thing; Hawke never flirt, except with Anders, and after being shot down a dozen times even those occasions were few and far between now. "And you are changing the subject. I'm onto you."

It wasn't fair, the way she invaded his space without a thought. She snarled and scratched like a wildcat, keeping everyone at a distance, but when she wanted to be close she purred, dodging the walls he set in her path with the way he deflected serious topics right back at her. Hawke held his gaze for a second longer than necessary, saw the guarded look creep back into his eyes, and she shook her head with a sigh.

"The subject," she glanced at the untouched lunch basket quickly, then at the bandages wound round his wrists and the sleeves of his coat, "is my hair."

"Your hair," he repeated, not trusting her to not crawl through the chinks in his armour unawares.

"The last person to cut my hair," she stared ahead at the dagger in the wall, not looking at him because some subjects were too sensitive for such a thing, "was my father."

When she glanced up again, his amber eyes were wide, mouth slightly agape and struck dumb. Hawke's attention finally shifted to the ends of his hair then, long, uneven, but even then alluring.

There was no 'flash' of understanding or a moment of epiphany, since this was something she might have known all along without giving a voice to. It was why she always escaped to his clinic here in the dark, barely above the sewers, the air thick with a mixture of fish, ash, and excrement. When she thought no one else understood, she sat here in a corner of his clinic, and there was no need for talk or comforting touches, his mere presence a panacea to her psyche.

Her self-inflicted loneliness and his, the guilt and shame of having caused the deaths of good people that they at one time knew as friends and family. Anders once told her that his mother was injured when the templars took him away, and he never found out whether she was living or dead. His long, ragged hair was a testament to something he thought only he understood - somehow, some way, his refusal to allow his hair be cut by other hands was his way of keeping his mother alive. That this touch, this gesture of measuring out each lock of hair and giving it shape was reserved for only one person.

The act of foreign hands touching his hair and erasing her touch would have been a sacrilege, were his scalp holy ground. He reached out then, arms tentatively enfolding her, hands comfortingly patting her upper back, tucking her head under his chin. A gesture of friendship, if his conscience did not allow more than this.

They stayed there for moments, minutes, or hours, it could have been any of those and it did not matter. It was old grief, bottled up and stale, but fresh in the sharing of it, finding someone who could understand and not judge or demand strength from her or indifference from him. In the home where she shouldered responsibility as head of her family or the Circle - prison - that served as temporary home for him, grieving was a weakness, a luxury ill afforded.

If her shoulders shook and her nails dug painfully into the thin fabric of his coat on his back, he did not pull away, and if she felt wetness in her hair later, well away from her scalp and so could not have been her sweat, she never mentioned it. When she finally pulled away, dry-faced, leaving a mess of wetness on his chest, the only evidence of her breakdown the slight puffiness under her eyes, she shot him a mock scowl that was unlike any of her faces that he'd seen.

"If you tell anyone about my sensitive head, I'll kill you," she spat, but her eyes were merry and her words lacked venom. There was no question of his secrecy in their embrace; that was already taken care of as of a dream upon waking.

"That's the Hawke we know and love," he smiled back at her scowl, which was looking lopsided and ridiculous since she couldn't stop one corner of her mouth from climbing into her cheek. Even so, he was careful to say 'we' instead of 'I,' boundaries firmly slid back into well-defined slots.

Instead of giving an answer, Hawke pushed herself off the cot, retrieved her dagger - wriggling it and tearing the slit in the wall wider in the process - and on returning it to the clip on her back, quickly slipped out the doors into Dark Town, her steps a little lighter than usual.

Anders barred the doors after her, extinguishing his lanterns in the process. It was always night in Dark Town, what little light that filtered in through the small slits in his wall he called a window sickly and dimmed by dust and smog. The walls of his little room in the back of the clinic were as oppressive as ever, but the bone weariness he felt at the end of a long day that usually descended into nightmares left him be, and his dreams, when they came, were of running through fields of flax of his childhood farmstead, early sun warming his back.

He saw his mother again, as he always had in these dreams comprised of his early memories. But instead of the blood and carnage he found in his home, evidence of a templar attack that left only silence in his house, she welcomed him with warm eyes and the smell of fresh bread wafting through the door. When he stepped through the threshold and greeted the memory of his father, stern as always, the expression of blame was no longer permanently etched there. Instead, he saw the shadow of a smile, a slight curl at the corner of his mouth. Perhaps it wasn't the absolution he craved, but he saw there the beginning of forgiveness, a way to move on beyond the tragic.


End file.
